Summary

Danticat begins her final essay by remembering the first time she walked through her parents’ neighborhood after her mother’s death, saying, “I wanted to see if my mother would still be walking these same streets—alone, invisible, without me” (165). Danticat then confesses there was a “kind of fragility” in her relationship with her mother, attributing this fragility to the years they spent apart (Danticat in the U.S.A. and her mother in Haiti).

Danticat then asserts that if she and her mother “had a symbol,” it was their feet (166). Danticat says that when her mother was dying, she kept taking photos of feet, in order to remind her of the walks she and her mother took together. On these walks, her mother would “lecture about some issue of great concern to her,” telling Danticat she needed to take better care of herself...